| Alpha | | Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 4:05 am Post subject: Iraq disaster warning - An attack on Iran by Christmas? |
| The second Lind article included below was by Michael Lind who is a former neocon:
Iraq disaster warning
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15568.htm
By WILLIAM S. LIND
UPI Outside View Commentator
11/10/06 -- - WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 (UPI) -- The third and final act in
the U.S. national tragedy that is the Bush administration may soon
play itself out.
Sources indicate increasing indications of "something big" happening
between the Nov. 7 congressional election and Christmas. That could
be the long-planned attack on Iran.
An attack on Iran will not be an invasion with ground troops. We
don't have enough of those left to invade Ruritania. It will be
a "package" of air and missile strikes, by U.S. forces or Israel.
That this would constitute folly piled on top of folly is no
deterrent to the Bush administration. Like the French Bourbons, it
forgets nothing and it learns nothing. It takes pride in not
adapting. Or did you somehow miss President George W. Bush's
declaration of Presidential Infallibility? It followed shortly after
his May 1, 2003 visit to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln
with the "Mission Accomplished" sign.
The Democrats taking either or both Houses of Congress, if it
happens, will not make any difference. They would rather have the
Republicans start and lose another war than prevent a national
disaster. Politics comes first and the country second.
Many of the consequences of a war with Iran are easy to imagine. Oil
would soar to at least $200 per barrel if we could get it. Gas
shortages would bring back the gas lines of 1973 and 1979. Our
European alliances would be stretched to the breaking point if not
beyond it. Most people outside the Bush bubble can see all this
coming.
What I fear no one forsees is a substantial danger that we could
lose the American army now deployed in Iraq. I have mentioned this
in previous columns, but I want to go into it here in more detail
because the scenario may soon go live.
Well before the second Iraq war started, I warned in a piece in The
American Conservative that the structure of our position in Iraq
could lead to that greatest of military disasters, encirclement.
That is precisely the danger if we go to war with Iran.
The danger arises because almost all of the vast quantities of
supplies American armies need come into Iraq from one direction, up
from Kuwait and other Gulf ports in the south. If that supply line
is cut, our forces may not have enough stuff, especially fuel, to
get out of Iraq. American armies are incredibly fuel-thirsty, and
though Iraq has vast oil reserves, it is short of refined oil
products. Unlike German World War Gen. Heinz Guderian's army on its
way to the Channel coast in 1940, we could not just fuel up at local
gas stations.
There are two ways our supply lines from the south could be cut if
we attack Iran. The first is by Shiite militias including the Mahdi
Army and the Badr Brigades, possibly supported by a general Shiite
uprising and, of course, Iran's Revolutionary Guards -- The same
guys who trained Hezbollah so well.
The second danger is that regular Iranian Army divisions will roll
into Iraq, cut our supply lines and attempt to pocket us in and
around Baghdad. Washington relies on American air power to prevent
this, but bad weather can shut most of that air power down.
Unfortunately, no one in Washington and few people in the U.S.
military will even consider this possibility. Why? Because we have
fallen victim to our own propaganda. Over and over the U.S. military
tells itself, "We're the greatest! We're number one! No one can
defeat us. No one can even fight us. We're the greatest military in
all of history!"
It's wrong. The U.S. armed forces are technically well-trained,
lavishly resourced Second Generation militaries. They are being
fought and defeated by Fourth Generation opponents in both Iraq and
Afghanistan. They can also be defeated by Third Generation enemies
who can observe, orient, decide and act more quickly than can
America's vast, process-ridden, Powerpoint-enslaved military
headquarters. They can be defeated by strategy, by stratagem, by
surprise and by preemption. Unbeatable militaries are like
unsinkable ships. They are unsinkable until someone or something
sinks them.
If the United States were to lose the army it has in Iraq, to Iraqi
militias, Iranian regular forces, or a combination of both (the most
likely event), the world would change. It would be our Adrianople,
our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power and prestige would never
recover.
One of the few people who does see this danger is the doyenne of
American foreign policy columnists, Georgie Anne Geyer. In her
column of Oct. 28 in The Washington Times, she wrote, "The worst has
not, by any means, yet happened. When I think of abandoning a
battleground, I think of (the 1840s), when thousands of Brits were
trying to leave Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass and all were
killed by tribesmen except one man, left to tell the story."
Our men and women in Iraq are in isolated compounds, not easy even
to retreat from, were that decision made. Time is truly running out.
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The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com
No cakewalk in the park?
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published November 13, 2006
"Ripley's Believe It Or Not" began in 1918 as a comic strip featuring unusual, hard-to-believe facts from around the world. Today it is a Web site for a global community that combs cyberspace for events so strange and unusual it is often hard to believe they are taking place. These days, you don't have to go further afield than Washington , D.C.
The neo-conservatives (neocons) who gave us the "cakewalk" prediction for Iraq before the war are now plugging "a walk in the park" in Iran -- i.e., a U.S. bombing campaign to consign the mullahs' nuclear ambitions to oblivion, or at least to retard the advent of an Iranian bomb for a few years, hoping that in the interim good democrats would rise up and send the clerics and their Revolutionary Guards packing.
Two Washington-based representatives of a global Fortune 100 company told their visiting senior executive this week a bombing campaign of Iran 's nuclear facilities "is inevitable while Mr. Bush is in the White House." The incredulous CEO thought his Washington eyes and ears were overstating the case. They assured him they were deadly serious.
Leading neocon Richard Perle, who led the intellectual charge for the ill-fated invasion of Iraq , believes two B-2 bombers, each with 16 independently targeted weapons systems, could punch out Iran 's nuclear lights. No Air Force expert we could find agreed. But the Pentagon's Air Force generals believe it can be done -- and successfully -- with a much larger operation, including five nights of bombing, some 400 aim points, 75 requiring deep penetration ordnance. Time magazine estimates 1,500 such aim points, or "viable targets," related to Iran 's widely scattered nuclear development complex. The Navy, with its carrier task forces and ship-launched cruise missiles, does not share the same degree of certainty.
No one has worked more assiduously for military action than Michael Ledeen, a neocon field marshal, who writes frequently about the "horrors" of Iran 's mullahocracy. His National Review Online commentary Nov. 1 was headlined "Delay." Mr. Ledeen has grown impatient over Mr. Bush's dangerous postponement of what he considers inevitable. "If the president knows Iran is waging war on us," wrote Mr. Ledeen, "he is obliged to respond; the only appropriate question is about the method, not the substance. If he does not know, then he should remove those officials who were obliged to tell him, and get some people who will tell the truth."
The truth has become an increasingly rare commodity in Washington . Mr. Ledeen concludes the president knows the truth, but thinks he may lack the political capital to directly challenge the mullahs. More likely, Mr. Bush's thinking has changed when confronted by the intelligence community's assessment of Iran 's retaliatory capabilities. They are described as "formidable." These include mining the Strait of Hormuz , the channel for two-fifths of the world's oil traffic, which would send oil prices skyrocketing to $200 per barrel almost overnight.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia 's ambassador to the U.S. , headed his country's intelligence service for 25 years. He warns that an attack against Iran would turn "the whole Persian Gulf into an inferno of exploding fuel tanks and shot-up facilities." Earlier this month, Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards test-fired dozens of missiles, including the long-range Shahab-3 (1,242 miles), Shahab-2 (cluster warhead of 1,400 bomblets), solid-fuel Zalzals, Zolfaghar73, Z-3, and SCUD-Bs, all timed to follow by two days the completion of U.S.-led allied naval maneuvers in the Gulf that Tehran described as "adventurist." Warships from Australia , Britain , France , Italy , Bahrain and the U.S. participated.
Dubbed "Great Prophet," Iran 's 10-day war games were designed "to show our deterrent and defensive power to trans-regional enemies, and we hope they will understand the message," said Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi.
Iran also has control over Hezbollah whose terrorist arm has already reached all the way to Argentina (in the mid-1990s) and whose sleeper cells, from Saudi Arabia's eastern oil fields where Shi'ites are the majority, to North America, are still feigning sleep.
Russia and China have made clear they will not be part of any tough sanction regime against Iran . They both have strong commercial ties to Iran . Tehran is paying Russia $700 million for 29 air defense missile systems. China signed a 10-year, $100 billion oil deal with Iran .
What the neocons dismiss as the "nervous nellies" of the intelligence community may have slipped in to President Bush's morning brief a subversive quote or two from conservative historian Paul Johnson, e.g., "Statesmen should never plunge into the future ... without first examining what guidance the past could supply?"
Mr. Ledeen, who acts as spokesman for Iran 's suppressed democratic forces, says, "The first step is to embrace the unpleasant fact that we are at war with Iran , and it is long past time to respond." The Iraqi debacle, along with the fading image of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower, as well as of Israel as the regional superpower, evidently persuaded President Bush to further disappoint the neocons. The Iraq Study Group's (ISG) James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton wanted neocon idol Donald Rumsfeld replaced as defense secretary before going public with their findings.
The new defense secretary, former CIA Director Robert M. Gates, a close friend of Mr. Baker, and also a member of ISG, has long favored direct talks with "Axis of Evil" charter member Iran . Mr. Baker, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Gates are now on the same wavelength. They believe bombing Iran would be an unmitigated disaster for U.S. interests the world over. The alternative is to explore a geopolitical deal with a country that has legitimate security interests.
The neocons' ideas for a walk in the Iranian park are still very much alive in Israel , whose very existence has been threatened by the mullahocracy. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will make clear to Mr. Bush today during a White House visit that Israel is not prepared to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.
Iran: The Next War (for Israel):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/28/iran-the-next-war-for-israel.php
AIPAC and the Neocon (War for Israel) agenda:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rf16XjbOUs
ISRAELI SPY RING PROBE WIDENS :
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/11/187362.php
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Something wicked this way comes: Is Olmert visiting GWB to plot an attack on Iran?
by Jane Stillwater
http://www.opednews.com
"Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert begins a U.S. visit on Sunday, seeking from President [sic] George W. Bush a post-election picture of U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran," read the headlines in CLG News. Think back, folks. What did Olmert and GWB do last time Olmert visited the White House? They planned the "war" on Lebanon.
So. What are George and Ehud gonna dream up this time? What do you want to bet that -- knowing Bush's addiction to killing people en masse and Olmert's love of things that explode -- that we are gonna see Iran attacked within the next two months.
Let's see. Olmert arrived at the White House in May 2006 in order to plan the attack on Lebanon. The attack then happened in July. That means that it took approximately two months for them to put their plans into action. So. Olmert arrives here in November. Let's do the math. Two months later? An attack on Iran just as the new Congress is getting it together? Perfect timing!
I'm willing to bet you a free all-expense-paid trip to Gaza that this is gonna happen. And this will be an easy bet to win! But if I lose, that's okay. If thousands -- if not hundreds of thousands -- of lives are spared in Israel and Iran because GWB's and EO's plans have been forced to be changed, that's okay with me. Plus Gaza is a closed military zone and they wouldn't let you in there anyway. Who wants Americans to see that their tax dollars are being spent to massacre women and children instead of being spent on schools, highways, public safety and healthcare back here at home?
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com
Stillwater is a freelance writer who hates injustice and corruption in any form but especially injustice and corruption paid for by American taxpayers. She can be reached at http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com or 510-843-0581
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War for Israel in Iraq to cost 2 trillion for Vet heath care
From: BGJDAVID
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2006 11:27:22 EST
Subject: Fwd: FPIF News | Shafting the Vets
" Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently calculated that the price tag for the long-term health care for Iraq War vets will exceed $2 trillion." A big price to pay just to insure that Iraq would not pose a threat to Israel. What next, Iran?
Forwarded Message
To: bgjdavid
From: "IRC" <communications@irc-online.org>
Subject: FPIF News | Shafting the Vets
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2006 11:04:56 -0500 (EST)
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New at FPIF
“A think tank without walls”
http://www.fpif.org/
Introducing the latest policy analysis from Foreign Policy In Focus
Shafting the Vets
By Conn Hallinan
Modern battlefields are toxic nightmares, filled with depleted uranium ammunition, exotic explosives, and deadly cluster bomblets. The soldiers are shot up with experimental vaccines that can have dangerous side effects from additives like squalene. In short, soldiers are not only under fire, they are assaulted by their own weapons systems and medical procedures.
Upwards of 20,000 Americans have been wounded in Iraq, some of those so grotesquely that medicine has invented a new term to describe them—polytrauma. An estimated 7,000 vets have severe brain and spinal injuries, and have required amputations. Calculating the cost of war is tricky, but Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently calculated that the price tag for the long-term health care for Iraq War vets will exceed $2 trillion.
But the hell we bring home is only a pale reflection of the hell we leave behind.
Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) columnist.
See new FPIF article online at:
http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/3695
With printer-friendly pdf version at:
http://fpif.org/pdf/gac/0611vets.pdf
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http://www.nowarforisrael.com
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com
http://nogw.com/warforisrael.html
Just saw the following as well:
Iran vows retaliation if Israel strikes
By NASSER KARIMI, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 26 minutes ago
Iran's military will retaliate swiftly and strongly if Israel attacks any Iranian nuclear sites, the Foreign Ministry said Sunday.
The warning came two days after Israel's deputy defense minister suggested Israel might be forced to launch a military strike against Iran's disputed nuclear program as "a last resort."
"If the Zionist regime commits such stupidity, the response by the Iranian military will be swift, strong and crushing," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini said. "Iran will take no longer than a second to respond."
The comments by Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh were the clearest yet from a high-ranking official of possible military action against Iran. However, the Israeli government later said the comments did not necessarily reflect its views or those of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Israel bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 to destroy Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program. While Israel neither acknowledges nor denies possessing nuclear arms, it is thought to have about 100-200 nuclear warheads, according to a 2006 report by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Hosseini downplayed the possibility of an Israeli attack. "The situation and capability of the Zionist regime are far too small to threaten Iran," he said.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, again criticized the U.N. Security Council over its efforts to impose sanctions on Iran because of its nuclear program. Iran says its program is for peaceful energy purposes, but the United States and other Western countries fear its a cover for developing weapons.
"It is most embarrassing that the U.N Security Council, which should be the defender of nations' security and rights, threatens countries pursuing nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes under the law," Ahmadinejad said, addressing the general assembly of Asian Parliaments Association for Peace in the capital, Tehran.
He accused the U.N. of applying a double standard, saying it was pursuing Iran "while those countries, armed with nuclear weapons, deny the rights of other countries to produce nuclear fuel and exploit it for peaceful purposes."
The Iranian president also criticized the United Nations for what he described as its lack of concern for the Palestinians. He condemned the United States for vetoing a U.N. Security Council draft resolution that criticized an Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip, including an artillery barrage that killed 19 civilians last week.
"While this fake regime commits crimes, the U.N. has not taken a single positive and operative step to restore the rights of the Palestinian nation," he said.
Hosseini, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, also said Iran began installing an additional 3,000 centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz with the knowledge of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog.
In October, Iran injected uranium gas into a second network of 164 centrifuges.
Injecting gas into centrifuges can either yield nuclear fuel or material for a warhead, but does not represent a major technological breakthrough and is unlikely to bring Iran within grasp of a weapon.
Iran produced a small batch of low-enriched uranium — suitable as nuclear fuel but not weapons grade — in February, using its initial cascade of 164 centrifuges at Natanz.
Earlier this year, Tehran said it planned to install 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz by year's end, but it would take 54,000 centrifuges to fuel a reactor.
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How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a War
by Michael Lind
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html
April 10, 2003
America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice President Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.
Equally wrong is the theory that the American and European civilizations are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the overrepresentation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans.
Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: They assume that the recent revolution in U.S. foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies – such as the selection rather than election of George W. Bush, and Sept. 11 – the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the U.S. population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals. (They are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right.) Inside the government, the chief defense intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R. Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department advisory body after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defense secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy." They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
The neocon defense intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the center of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think tanks, foundations and media empires. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) provide homes for neocon "in-and-outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neocons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defense experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired general Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he cosigned a Jinsa letter that began: "We ... believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defense Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority."
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organization of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist." While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborated with Perle to coauthor a policy paper for Likud that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories, and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are Southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidize Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots – odd as it seems – in the British Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox television network. His magazine, the Weekly Standard – edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice president, 1989-1993) – acts as a mouthpiece for defense intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-1994) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.
Strangest of all is the media network centered on the Washington Times – owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Rev. Sun Myung Moon – which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghostwriter for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "gotcha!" style of right-wing British journalism, and its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement.
The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a P.R. technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neocons published a series of public letters whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favorite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied.
How did the neocon defense intellectuals – a small group at odds with most of the U.S. foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic – manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first – a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process – and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.
Then they had a stroke of luck – Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hard-line allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
The neocons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA, and vice president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power). His father is essentially a northeastern moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to Southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the Southern culture.
The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie," as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave him something he had lacked: a mission in life other than following in his dad's footsteps. There are signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading son: Last year, veterans of the first Bush administration, including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorization from Congress and the U.N.
It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the U.S. from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction," something the leading neocons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves. The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon, and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with U.S. attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neocons as vicious anti-Semitism. Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather than the U.S. The neocons urge war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the U.S., a far greater problem.
So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the U.S. into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the U.S. and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaida attacks, any U.S. president would likely have gone to war to topple bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the U.S. has done since then would have been different had America's 18th century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion.
For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of the Rev. Ian Paisley, extreme Euroskeptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types – all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird.
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Chalmers Johnson (author of 'Blowback' and 'The Sorrows and Empire') was recently interviewed by Ian Masters as well (see www.ianmasters.org) as the interview with Michael Lind will be added there to archive in the future:
Dr. Chalmers Johnson on the rise of a militaristic Japanese leadership, supported by American neocons, and what he views as a crisis of American democracy with the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Dr. Chalmers is an author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He is also president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, an organization promoting public education about Japan and Asia. He has written numerous books including, most recently, two essential examinations of the consequences of American empire, Blowback: the costs and consequences of American empire and The Sorrows of Empire: militarism, secrecy and the end of the republic. Blowback won an American Book Award in 2001, and was re-issued in an updated version in 2004. Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, updated the evidence and argument from Blowback for the post-9/11 environment. Johnson was centrally featured in the Eugene Jarecki-directed film Why We Fight, which won the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. His forthcoming book is "Nemesis: the last days of the American Republic."
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PRO-ISRAEL LOBBY IN US UNDER ATTACK:
http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20060
Intl. Intelligence
WASHINGTON, March 20 (UPI) -- Two of America's top scholars have published a searing attack on the role and power of Washington's pro-Israel lobby in a British journal, warning that its "decisive" role in fomenting the Iraq war is now being repeated with the threat of action against Iran. And they say that the Lobby is so strong that they doubt their article would be accepted in any U.S.-based publication.
Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, author of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kenney School, and author of "Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy," are leading figures American in academic life.
They claim that the Israel lobby has distorted American policy and operates against American interests, that it has organized the funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel and "has a stranglehold" on the U.S. Congress, and its ability to raise large campaign funds gives its vast influence over Republican and Democratic administrations, while its role in Washington think tanks on the Middle East dominates the policy debate.
And they say that the Lobby works ruthlessly to suppress questioning of its role, to blacken its critics and to crush serious debate about the wisdom of supporting Israel in U.S. public life.
"Silencing skeptics by organizing blacklists and boycotts -- or by suggesting that critics are anti-Semites -- violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends," Walt and Mearsheimer write.
"The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel's backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned," they add, in the 12,800-word article published in the latest issue of The London Review of Books.
The article focuses strongly on the role of the "neo-conservatives" within the Bush administration in driving the decision to launch the war on Iraq.
"The main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to the Likud," Mearsheimer and Walt argue." Given the neo-conservatives' devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn't surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests."
"The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam's removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) or WINEP (Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy), and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war," Walt and Mearsheimer write.
The article, which is already stirring furious debate in U.S. academic and intellectual circles, also explores the historical role of the Lobby.
"For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel," the article says.
"The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only U.S. security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the U.S. been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?" Professors Walt and Mearsheimer add.
"The thrust of U.S. policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the 'Israel Lobby'. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. interests and those of the other country - in this case, Israel -- are essentially identical," they add.
They argue that far from being a strategic asset to the United States, Israel "is becoming a strategic burden" and "does not behave like a loyal ally." They also suggest that Israel is also now "a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
"Saying that Israel and the U.S. are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around," they add. "Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel's presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits."
They question the argument that Israel deserves support as the only democracy in the Middle East, claiming that "some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens."
The most powerful force in the Lobby is AIPAC, the American-Israel Public affairs Committee, which Walt and Mearsheimer call "a de facto agent for a foreign government," and which they say has now forged an important alliance with evangelical Christian groups.
The bulk of the article is a detailed analysis of the way they claim the Lobby managed to change the Bush administration's policy from "halting Israel's expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state" and divert it to the war on Iraq instead. They write "Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical."
"Thanks to the lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians," and conclude that "Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and U.S. policy more even-handed."
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Mearsheimer replies to the irate "Israel Lobby"
Letters - The Israel Lobby - From John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt.
We wrote 'The Israel Lobby' in order to begin a discussion of a subject that had become difficult to address openly in the United States (LRB, 23 March). We knew it was likely to generate a strong reaction, and we are not surprised that some of our critics have chosen to attack our characters or misrepresent our arguments. .... Must Read !!!
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n09/letters.html
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/print/mear01_.html
Iran: The Next War (for Israel):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/28/iran-the-next-war-for-israel.php
Additional at following URL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/03/17/u-s-middle-east-policy-motivated-by-pro-israel-lobby.php
US Support of Israel PRIMARY MOTIVATION for the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and on 9/11:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/08/05/the-gorilla-in-the-room-is-us-support-for-israel.php
Bamford discusses 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel agenda on MSNBC's 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann':
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/08/07/bamford-discusses-a-clean-break-on-msnbc-s-countdown.php
The following article is right in accordance with the 'A Clean Break' agenda as 'A Clean Break' was written for Netanyahu who is apparently going to replace Olmert:
Honor First?; the liberation of Lebanon :
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article14620.htm
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The Lobby and the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon:
Their Facts and Ours
by James Petras
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 29, 2006
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Petras29.htm
Israel's attack on Lebanon resulted in 9/11:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/17/israel-s-attack-on-lebanon-resulted-in-9-11.php
AIPAC, JINSA and similar have prevented Israel's treacherous attack on the USS Liberty from ever being investigated fully (with the survivors testifying before Congress) because traitorous AIPAC hacks like John McCain have helped to keep the USS Liberty cover-up perpetuated in service of a foreign government:
http://www.ussliberty.org
http://rense.com/Datapages/usslib.htm | |
